vacant chair among them. In front of them, and at right angles to the general public, sat the coroner's jury, five good men of the county and two women. There was an attitude of respectful decorum about them, as if they had been in church. The Saint sized them up as being a representative panel of local shopkeepers. Only one of them was markedly different from the others —a little black-bearded scowling man who seemed to resent being in court at all.
The coroner was a well-fed, well-scrubbed looking man with close-cropped gray hair and a close-cropped gray moustache. He wore a dark suit, with a stiff white collar and a blue bow tie with small white spots on it. While the jury was being sworn, he shuffled over a small batch of papers on his table, which occupied the centre of a dais at the very end of the room.
When the jury were seated again, he cleared his throat noisily and addressed them.
'We are here to inquire into the circumstances attending the death of the late John Kennet. It is your duty to listen carefully to the evidence which will be put before you and to return a verdict in accordance with that evidence. The facts concerning which evidence will be given are as follows. On the night of the seventeenth, the house known as Whiteways, the property of Mr Fairweather, was burnt to the ground. Various people were in the house when the fire started, including Mr Fairweather himself, General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady Sangore, Mr Kane Luker, Lady Valerie Woodchester, Captain Donald Knightley and the deceased. All of them except Captain Knightley are in court today. They will tell you that after they had left the building they discovered that John Kennet was missing. An attempt to reach his room was unsuccessful owing to the rapid spread of the fire, and on the following day his charred remains were found in the wreckage of the house.'
His manner was brusque and important; quite plainly, nobody could tell him anything about how to run an inquest, and equally plainly he regarded a jury as nothing but a necessary evil, to be kept firmly in its place.
'If you wish to do so you are entitled to view the body. Do you wish to view the body?' He paused perhaps long enough to take another breath, and said: 'Very well, then. We shall proceed to hear evidence of how the body was found. Call the first witness.'
The sergeant standing behind him consulted a list of names and called out: 'Theodore Bream.'
A man who looked rather like a retired carthorse lumbered up on to the dais, sweating profusely, and took the oath. The coroner leaned back in his chair and looked him over like a schoolmaster inspecting a new pupil.
'You are the captain of the Anford Fire Brigade?'
'Yessir.'
'On the morning of the eighteenth you examined the ruins of Whiteways.'
'Yessir.'
'What did you find?'
'In the ruins of the library, among a lot of daybree, I found the body of the deceased.'
'Did you find anything else?'
'Yessir. I found bits of a burned-up bedstead—coil springs and suchlike.'
'What deductions did you make from the position of the body and the burned fragments of the bedstead?'
'Well, sir, I come to the conclusion that they'd dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms above.'
The coroner rubbed his chin.
'I see. You came to the conclusion that the bed, with the deceased in it,
